Industrial engineering has played a central role in creating knowledge on quality control and reliability engineering (Q&R) and delivering such knowledge to various industries. This special issue paper is prepared in celebration of the anniversary of the Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers (KIIE), and includes discussions on how Q&R areas have evolved over almost 100 years and on the current domestic and international trends of Q&R activities in industry as well as in academia. To identify academic research trends, all Q&R related papers published in the Journal of the Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers (JKIIE) and IE Interfaces are examined and classified according to their research topics. Recent Q&R related papers published in IIE Transactions are also examined and classified in a similar manner, and the papers published in KIIE journals are compared with those in IIE Transactions with respect to the research areas emphasized, yearly trend of each research area, type of systems studied, research approaches and methodologies adopted, etc. In addition, quality control activities in domestic industries are evaluated based on a recent survey conducted by Korea Productivity Center, and for domestic reliability engineering activities, government-led projects and their accomplishments over the past decade are introduced. Based on the above, recommendations are made for the future directions of academic research and Q&R activities in industry.

Over 40 years, the domestic manufacturing industry of Korea played the vital role in creating national wealth, employment and innovation in its economy. In 2011, industrial products made up 99.7 percent of exports, and formed 31.2 percent of GDP. Given those facts, the research of manufacturing systems engineering for higher manufacturing efficiency and its industrial applications have been essential for Korea`s economic growth. In this paper, for celebrating the 40th anniversary of the foundation of Korea institute of industrial engineers (KIIE), the research results and its industrial applications of KIIE are reviewed and summarized in the area of manufacturing systems engineering over past 40 years. Directions of future manufacturing system and the role of industrial engineers for our continuous economic growth are also mentioned.

For the commemoration of 40 years of Industrial Engineering in Korea, Ergonomics in Korea for the last 40 years are presented in this paper. Historical backgrounds, past achievements, and key historical landmarks are explained and analyzed. In addition, a keyword content analyses on the 1,005 titles from the research paper published from 1983 to 2014 are conducted to display the structural patterns of the changes of research focus of the ergonomics in Korea. Finally, some important perspectives with regard to the prospects for the future of ergonomics in Korea are also summarized.

This is a report on the history and current status of production planning and control activities in South Korea with regard to Industrial Engineers` (IEs`) role. One of the main characteristics of Korean global companies is that they make good use of IEs not only in their production but also in higher strategic fields like supply chain management. In these companies it is well demonstrated that instead of adding small part of IE skills to traditional engineers, it is much more competitive to have IEs work with them as a team since IEs are fully proficient in every kind of productivity and quality improvement tools. It is also observed that IEs become more productive when they have good domain knowledge in their own industries like semi-conductor, automobile, telecommunications, steel, shipbuilding, etc. So teaching the basics for manufacturing processes to IE students seems very important for their future career development.

This paper reviews Operations Research (OR)/Management Science (MS) in Korea. After a brief survey of global OR/MS, this paper analyzes the research trend in Korea over the past forty years with respect to approach, methods, types of data, and so on. The OR/MS application and practice in Korea are also surveyed and the change of them with time is shown. To do this, we refer to four main OR/MS journals published in Korea. The future of OR/MS is discussed in practice, methods to problem-solving, and education.

Lately there are many approaches for decreasing the retail prices for mobile telecommunication in response to higher demand of the consumer welfare. Related on this perspective, there have been many disputes how the MTR (mobile termination rate)s from the whole market has influences on the consumer prices at the retail market. Therefore, we need a timely review about the possibility of the reduction of retail prices with MTR policies. The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between MTR and retail prices. For this purpose, we can identify three kinds of arguments by reviewing the previous literatures. We empirically analyze the relationship with latest European data and Korean annual data. Furthermore, we also examine whether the relationship would depend on the competition structure. The results imply that decreasing MTR would result in reduction of the retail prices but the effect would be enhanced by improvement of market concentration.

This paper aims to construct and analyze the domestic collaborative research network in industrial engineering. Using co-authorship information contained in the papers published in the two journals of the Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers, the collaborate research network at the institutional level is constructed. The core institutions in the network are identified by means of the centrality indexes of social network analysis. In addition, the five types of roles of the institutions in industry-university-institute cooperation are examined through brokerage analysis: coordinator, consultant, gatekeeper, representative, and liaisons. The findings are expected to be fruitfully utilized in formulation of R&D strategy of relevant organizations and technology policy making for promoting collaborative research in industrial engineering.

Stepwise efficiency improvement in data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based benchmarking is a realistic and effective method by which inefficient decision making units (DMUs) can choose benchmarks in a stepwise manner and, thereby, effect gradual performance improvement. Most of the previous research relevant to stepwise efficiency improvement has focused primarily on how to stratify DMUs into multiple layers and how to select immediate benchmark targets in leading levels for lagging-level DMUs. It can be said that the sequence of benchmark targets was constructed in a myopic way, which can limit its effectiveness. To address this issue, this paper proposes an optimization approach to the construction of a sequence of benchmarks in DEA-based benchmarking, wherein two optimization criteria are employed : similarity of input-output use patterns, and proximity of input-output use levels between DMUs. To illustrate the proposed method, we applied it to the benchmarking of 23 national universities in South Korea.

In this paper, a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) approach is proposed for an n-job, m-machine flow shop scheduling problem with limited capacity buffers with blocking in which the objective is to minimize the total stretch. The stretch of a job is the ratio of the amount of time the job spent before its completion to its processing time. HGA adopts the idea of seed selection and development in order to improve the exploitation and exploration power of genetic algorithms (GAs). Extensive computational experiments have been conducted to compare the performance of HGA with that of GA.